2014-2015

Even after Peter and the Starcatcher — ten months on the road with a pretty lucrative Broadway tour — I had a tough time finding representation.

Then I got an call from Will Cantler, a major casting director I’d known for over a decade. Will rarely works with early-career actors, and he’d never called me in. He'd recently seen my performances in two Assembly shows, though: as a narcissistic communist in HOME/SICK and as a suicidal depressive in That Poor Dream. In December 2014, six months after the Starcatcher tour, Will asked me to audition for the role of a suicidal communist in my first major Off Broadway show.*

I booked the play — an adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's Soviet-era farce The Suicide — and I got to appear opposite some of my favorite actors on the planet, including Joey Slotnick, who I'd seen as a pitch-perfect Groucho Marx at Williamstown; Mary Beth Peil, who'd played a transcendent Beggar Woman in Sweeney Todd at The Kennedy Center.

For the first time, some managers and agents expressed interest. A month later, I was signed as part of the inaugural roster of 44 West Entertainment.

I went on exactly nine times in the ten months I understudied Peter and the Starcatcher: four times as Mrs. Bumbrake, three times as Smee, and twice as Fighting Prawn. The show's innovative staging was breathlessly choreographed, and I had to master not just five actors' lines, but their complex staging, as well as songs in five-part harmony, a ditty on the ukulele, sexy mermaid choreography, and a legion of different accents: R.P., Cockney, Western, Northern, Scottish, and an "unplaceable island dialect".

Every one of those nine performances was challenging and revelatory.

Even more challenging were the other 250-odd performances, during which I stood in the wings or sat in the house or waited in the dressing room. As you can see from this archive, I'd never gone so many months without performing on a regular basis — not since I was a child.

(Most people think of childhood as the last time they played make-believe; for me, it's the last time I didn't.)

Still, I felt incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to spend a year working on Rick's remarkable play — a prequel to Peter Pan — in an endlessly inventive production helmed by the imaginative Alex Timbers and the inimitable Roger Rees.

Having worked with Roger closely and inspired by him profoundly, I was shocked by his untimely death a year later.

HOME/SICK

Production (College Tour)

January 30-31, 2014

Role: Tommy

The Assembly @ Wesleyan University

The Assembly's first university engagement.

While Starcatcher played the Kennedy Center, I stepped out for a couple of days to remount HOME/SICK — this time at Wesleyan University, where we were joined for post-show discussions by Mark Rudd, a founding member of the Weather Underground whose memoir was one of our major sources for writing the play.

Ben with former Weatherman Mark Rudd

Barbara Cassidy (right) with Edith Harnick, one of the Visions playwrights

VISIONS

Performance

June 6, 2014

conceived and directed by Barbara Cassidy

with Pernell Walker

After several weeks leading a playwrighting group comprised entirely of blind senior citizens, Barbara Cassidy brought in actors to read from her students' work.

Many of the seven blind playwrights performed with us.

CROOKED AND NARROW

Independent Film (Feature)

June 27-29, 2014 (Principal Photography)

written and directed by Neal Dhand

Role: James

Discreet Charm Productions

"Amy Walsh (Lindsay Goranson) returns to Philadelphia after 10 years to visit her ex-cop, current-con father and to join a stick-up crew. After a job gone wrong, Warren Mercer (Brian Anthony Wilson), the cop who put her dad in prison gets on her trail."

A fan of Brian Wilson's performance in The Wire, I was thrilled to play his partner in Crooked and Narrow, which shot on location in Philadelphia. A dirty cop, more venal than vicious, my character finds himself in unexpectedly dangerous territory when Amy and Warren declare war on each other.

Brian still calls me "pard" (for partner) though it's been years since we last worked together.

Role: Trigorin

The Assembly @ the undergroundzero festival

A mashup of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine.

THE PROPOSITIONAL FUNCTION

Workshop

September 22-25, 2014

written and directed by Barbara Cassidy

with Amy Jo Jackson, Rob Franklin Neill, and Bret Robinson

Role: X

JACK

Thanks to support from JACK, Barbara expanded what had begun as a solo show to incorporate three additional characters: mysterious narrators whose perspectives may or may not reflect the central strangeness of the troubled and troubling protagonist.

THAT POOR DREAM

Production

October 4-26, 2014

TEXT BY BEN BECKLEY AND THE ASSEMBLY

Role: Bentley Drummle

The Assembly @ The New Ohio

A year after relinquishing the role of Miss Havisham to tour with Peter and the Starcatcher, I wrote myself back into That Poor Dream as Bentley Drummle, a treacherous Ivy League trustifarian with a violent streak.

dir. Neil Pepe

Role: Yegor Timoveivich

Atlantic Theater Company

By my count, there are about fifteen Off Broadway theater companies in New York with endowments of $2 million or more that consistently produce full seasons of new, high-profile plays. By October of 2014, eleven years after moving to the city, I'd never worked at a single one of them.

In fact, only once had I even auditioned for one.

One afternoon, lamenting this fact to my fiancée, I got two emails on my phone: invitations to audition for projects at Atlantic Theater Company and Classic Stage Company.

After I booked the show at Atlantic, I had to turn down the second audition.

A DOLL'S HOUSE

Closed Reading

January 13-16, 2015

by Henrik Ibsen, dir. Rachel Chavkin

with Megan Ketch, Nikiya Mathis and Anatol Yusef

Role: Dr. Rank

I'd first read Dr. Rank with Megan and Rachel a year before.

Since then, I'd seen both a critically acclaimed Doll's House at Brooklyn Academy of Music and Atlantic Theater Company's Posterity, Doug Wright's unnerving chronicle of Ibsen's final days. Though neither quite reflected the raw contemporary immediacy we're eager to capture in this particular incarnation, both productions were on my mind throughout the workshop.

Atlantic Theater Company

KING MICHAEL

Closed Reading

February 20, 2015

by Eric John Meyer

with Ray Campbell, Jean Ann Douglass, and Larry Powell

Roles: Randy, Sneddon, Dr. Klein

Eric Meyer's brilliant new play on the final days of Michael Jackson. Dividing Michael the Icon and Michael the Man into two separate characters (played by a man and a woman, respectively), Eric explores the majesty, mystery, and dysfunction of both MJ and America.

33 DEMON TEETH

Workshop

March 1, 2015

devised by the ensemble

with Stephen Aubrey, Edward Bauer, Nick Benacerraf and Emily Perkins

The Assembly @ IRT

The first workshop of what would become I Will Look Forward to This Later.

Originally inspired by Emily's experiences caring for her aging grandmother, the workshop also incorporated original audio footage of my late acting teacher Gene Lasko and of the radical anarchist writer/director/performer Judith Malina.

Gene, whom I'd interviewed, passed away a couple of months before the workshop, and Judith, whom the company interviewed, died a few weeks later.

We also drew on The Ballad of Narayama, a Kabuki-infused Japanese film which tells the story of a small town where citizens who had reached the age of 70 were taken to the top of the mountain of Narayama and left to die there. The film's central character, an old woman at peace with her impending abandonment, still has all of her teeth, and some of the villagers mock her for having "33 demon teeth".

EMPIRE TRAVEL AGENCY

Closed Workshop

April 7, 2015

by Paul Cohen, dir. Teddy Bergman

with Gardiner Comfort

Woodshed Collective

The fifth project I've developed with Woodshed Collective.

Empire Travel Agency is an immersive theatrical experience. Over the course of the performance, the audience uncovers a cast international conspiracy, with profound implications for the future of the human race.

A NIGHT OF PHILOSOPHY -

PHILOSOPHY IN THE BOUDOIR

Performance

April 25, 2015 (midnight to 5:30 AM)

by The Marquis de Sade

with Chris Ghaffari, Jed Peterson and Jeremy Xido

Role: Madame de Saint-Ange

Cultural Institute of France @ The Ukrainian Institute

From midnight until 5:30 in the morning, Chris, Jed, Jeremy and I performed the Marquis de Sade's infamous 300-page text in almost its entirety.

We staged the play in a single row of chairs around the perimeter of a small room on the second floor of the Ukranian Institute. The audience — who had braved the late hour, brutal weather, and long lines to get into the event — were free to sit among us, and to come and go at will.

LA PRINCESA

Reading

April 26, 2015

by Hank Willenbrink, dir. Jose Zayas

with Eliza Bent, Ryan McCarthy, Greg Perri and Liz Ramos

Role: The Grand Inquisitor

JACK

Hank Willenbrink chairs the drama program at The University of Scranton, where he's brought in several brilliant downtown New York theater artists like Eliza Bent, Jess Chayes, and Jose Zayas.

Chronicling the strange, true story of the only female Jesuit in the history of the Catholic Church, La Princesa marries medieval content to modern vernacular.

MFA WRITING WORKSHOP

Closed Reading

May 3, 2015

works-in-progress by Stacy Osei-Kuffour and others

under the direction of Arthur Kopit

with Eric Lockley, Larry Powell and Christina Pumariega

Hunter College, MFA Playwrighting @ The Lark Play Development Center

Though I know his work and his son, I'd never actually met Arthur Kopit before this workshop.

As you might expect from his long and varied career, Kopit is a warm and knowledgeable guy, and a real presence even in this low-key setting.

Role: Teucros

Dutch Kills @ Shetler Studios

Broadway musical veteran Alexandra Silber had recently adapted, directed and starred in Euripides' TROJAN WOMEN at Pace University. Helmed by prolific director Carolyn Cantor, this workshop brought together many actors whose work I knew from professional plays and musicals alongside a chorus made up of Al's student actors from Pace.

The process reminded me of CATO (2008), another classical drama with a non-equity chorus supporting a group of professional actors in the leading roles.

Only this time, I was on the other side.

MAYBE NEVER FELL

Reading

June 6, 2015

by Howard Meyer, dir. Jenn Haltman

with Anita Anthonj, Alexander Moitzi and Ward Riley

Role: Max

Axial Theatre

I played a Jewish American businessman who has to face his own deep-seated fears and prejudices when he falls in love with a German girl in Nepal.

THE PEOPLE FROM PORLOCK

Closed Reading

June 8, 2015

by Stephen Aubrey, dir. Jess Chayes

with Edward Bauer, Emily Caffery, Jess Cummings, and May Treuhaft-Ali

Role: Tim

The Assembly

Steve Aubrey wrote a play about an intrepid group of revolutionaries who seek to liberate the world from the scourge of the American Dream by disseminating classic works of American literature. He also wrote a play about an office of professionally stymied, sexually frustrated co-workers who yearn to break free from their humdrum surroundings.

The Assembly @ The New Ohio

TITTY BOY

Closed Reading

July 27, 2015

by Larry Powell

Role: Dad

The Lark Play Development Center

Larry Powell, about to start rehearsals for Lucas Hnath's hit The Christians at Playwrights Horizons, came up with a bizarre and surprisingly moving idea for a play: a riff on the classic children's book Are You My Mother? that explored one young African-American man's disenchantment with and alienation from American society.

I played one of the young man's white parents, who break the news to him, after eighteen years of lying, that he's not their biological son.

Staged Reading (Musical)

October 12, 2015

music by Stephanie Johnstone, lyrics and book by Stephanie Johnstone and Josh William Gelb

JACK

An inspired musical fantastia about the gory glories of piracy — and its attendant horrors.

PROTECTUS

Staged Reading

November 2, 2015

by Helayne Schiff, dir. Jessi Hill

with Teddy Bergman, Dean Imperial, Liv Rooth, and Jeanine Serralles

Role: Stan/FBI Agent

Naked Angels

On September 11, 2001, debris from the World Trade Center smashed through Helayne's apartment window. She wrote this remarkable play about surviving the terror of 9/11 and the looting that followed it.

EASY LIVING

Independent Film (Feature)

November 9, 2015 (Principal Photography)

written and directed by Adam Keleman

with Caroline Dhavernas and C.J. Wilson

Role: Man In Bar

A week after Protectus reunited me with Dying For It castmate Jeanine Serralles, Easy Living brought me back in contact with another Dying For It alum: C.J. Wilson.

I hadn't seen either of them since the show closed in January, and was shocked to discover Jeanine was six months pregnant.

LATTER DAYS

Staged Reading

November 14, 2015

dir. Jess Chayes

with Moti Margolin and Tony Torn

Dutch Kills

A staged reading of my first full-length play.

Tony Torn, a fierce and fearless actor, took on the role of the demented (or possibly visionary) self-proclaimed monarch who for eleven years has sat on a gutted toilet under the streets of some godforsaken metropolis, waiting for the world to end. Moti Margolin as his steadfast servant Dead Bill conveyed both a natural sweetness and a subtle sense of anger.

The play is about our need to believe in things and the impossibility of believing in things. It's something I understood from growing up in the Methodist Church and from my work in the theater, where thousands of us wait endlessly for a grand apotheosis of career and art that may never come.

Jess directed with incisive grace. Though we'd worked together on short pieces for The Assembly, this was our first time collaborating on a full-length play that I'd written.

playwright Rachel Bonds

SWIMMERS

Closed Reading

November 16, 2015

by Rachel Bonds, dir. Mike Donahue

with Coleman Domingo and Hannah Cabell

Role: Yuri

The Lark Play Development Center

Coleman Domingo (Passing Strange, Lincoln) and Hannah Cabell (Zero Hour) are two of my favorite actors, and it was thrilling to read with them. It was thrilling also to read a new play by Rachel Bonds, who has an uncanny ability to capture the sadness at the heart of so much contemporary life.